hunting high and low

I had forgotten that the brilliant and quintessentially eighties band A-ha hail from Norway. Next summer, the performers will celebrate their thirty years as a group with a concert in Brazil, the Rock in Rio festival having been founded the same year as the band.

coolhunting or memetic

Via Kottke, Business Week magazine celebrates its eighty-fifth birthday with an articulated list of the eighty-five most troublesome concepts in the market-place.

The city-state of Singapore, mortgages, the interwebs, a coffee magnate, infant formula, out-sourcing, open-source, and global positioning among many others are included with detailed articles and charts that explain how each of these ideas changed the economy and society. For example, #75 is Jane Fonda’s Workout, which propelled both the VCR and the self-help industry, #84 is the Polaroid instant camera, which was a harbinger of social media and #25 is the decoding of the human genome that launched a mad-dash for Big Pharma and fostered an era of not scientific ignorance but rather scientific apathy as if anything that could be captive and quantified warranted no further curiosity. You ought to check out the entire listing of big ideas and maybe you’ll be the next innovative insurgent yourself.

peep-hole or desk-set

Not long after the invention of photography, thanks to the genius of the Earl of Stanhope in crafting a simple, tiny magnifying lens (which bears his name)—the public also developed quite a penchant for the novelty of microscopic pictures.

Collectors’ Weekly once again presents readers with a curious and curated trove that illustrates the development of this rage. Virtually invisible images could be embedded discretely in any number of everyday objects and people could steal a glance at a loved one, picture-postcard holiday scene, the royal family or a holy icon without worrying about people gawking over their shoulders. Quite a lot of that kind of memorabilia was produced and I remember having these neat little cone-shaped souvenirs from Carlsbad Caverns as a little kid and was amazing by how much depth these pictures of caves seemed to have, disorienting like looking up and over through a periscope—or looking up from a screen after staring at it for too long. It’s funny how those themselves screens are migrating from telephones to less conspicous watch-faces. The majority of miniscule pictures printed, however, were of an arguably less wholesome variety: Victorian ladies and gentlemen kept a stash of more intimate and erotic photos secreted away from prying-eyes in plain sight.  

herostratic fame

Naturally there is a big difference between street art and graffiti and senseless vandalism, and certain landmarks are particularly attractive targets for both rage and expression.

It’s bad enough that Hans Christen Anderson’s Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen is routinely decapitated, I learnt that contrary to the popular account, the nose of the Sphinx was not accidentally damaged by stray canon fire from Napoleon’s advance on Egypt but was rather defaced by a religious zealot who wanted to put a stop to the idolatry (real or perceived) of the farmers along the flood plains of the Nile, who prayed to the colossus for a good harvest. Horrified, the farmers lynched the extremist for this act. These willfully destructive acts strike me as very sophomoric, something that ought be intolerable even among rival college sports teams. Herostratus (auf Deutsche, Herostrat is a criminal hunger for glory) is the name of the arsonist who infamously burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and proudly owed up to the act, hoping for immortal notoriety. Herostratus was immediately put to death for this heinous deed and decreed that his infamy never be mentioned again, but that did not quite work out according to plan as his example has not exactly gone unfollowed. One can hope, though, that tearing down is ultimately up-building.